“You don’t need to crunch around in Gore-Tex to be subversive, if you’re a woman,” writes Lauren Elkin, author of the wide-ranging and inspiring new book about walking in the city, Flâneuse. “Just walk out your front door.”

Elkin holds a PhD from CUNY and the Université de Paris VII, and has written essays for the New York Times Book Review, the London Review of Books, and the Times Literary Supplement. In Flâneuse, she recalls the initial thrill of exploring New York City in her early twenties, and the sense of astonishment she feels in other cities, in particular Paris, where she has lived

Novelist, poet, and translator Harry Mathews died on January 25 of this year. Born in New York City in 1930, he studied music at Harvard, and after moving to France in the '50s, started writing fiction, publishing his first novel, The Conversions, in 1962. His capacity for literary invention seemed limitless, writing works full of eccentric twists, puzzles, and James-ian eloquence. He became the only American member of the Oulipo, a group that included Raymond Quenuau and other avant-garde luminaries, and ushered one of that movement's definitive works, Georges Perec's A Void, a novel that does

In his native Argentina, César Aira no longer shocks audiences with his genre-bending works, surrealist plot twists, or the sheer pace of his output (he’s written more than eighty books as part of his fuga hacia adelante, a “flight forward”). New Directions began translating his work into English about a decade ago, and since then, most Anglophone critics have focused on on Aira’s formal inventiveness: How I Became a Nun (translated in 2007), for instance, gleefully unravels a traditional bildungsroman plot, beginning with the narrator’s faux-somber recollection of her revulsion, as a six-year-old,

The first time I ran away I must have been seven, soon after the victory.

In early June I spent several days in the wild. I didn't sleep in Strukovsky Garden: around there, all the usable spots had been defiled; through the cracks in the band shell I could see feces and mold. But I did find a spot—in the director's office at the Officers' Club.

Along with other kids, I had learned long since to get in past the guards of the Officers' Club to watch movies and learned to collect bread crumbs from the club's bread wagon after the driver and the cook took the last crate to the kitchen and the

Americans love their nostalgic cultural icons more than God and country. As our faith in every cherished institution from religion to the free press to science to democracy erodes before our eyes, our belief in The Force grows stronger by the day. "Luminous beings are we, not this crude matter!" we remind each other in yoga classes and Cineplexes and Comic-Con lines and also, probably, in bed. But why wouldn't we prefer a devil-may-care space smuggler and a sassy princess to the citizens of the real world—preachers and teachers and scientists and diplomats and journalists? Who wouldn't choose

The fiction of Ludmilla Petrushevskaya, one of Russia's most celebrated living writers, can be divided into two categories. Her realistic work deals mostly with the lives of Soviet women, presenting a picture bleak enough that the stories were unpublishable in the USSR. In the US, Petrushevskaya is better known for the surreal, dystopian stories she describes as "real fairy tales." Yet despite their fantastical elements, these stories, too, are grounded in Soviet reality: Their characters are preoccupied, as were citizens under Stalin, with food, housing, and violent death.

Petrushevskaya's